Sculpture built for MOCA's Project Atrium visible from four floors

Photos by Will.Dickey@jacksonville.com A wooden sculpture by Gustavo Godoy titled "Empty Altar/Empty Throne" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville.

Visitors can climb into the interior of "Empty Altar/Empty Throne."

One of the first things Marcelle Polednik did after taking over as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville in February is look for exhibits that could take advantage of the museum’s Atrium Gallery, a space that is 40 feet and four stories high.

The first Project Atrium exhibit, “High Fashion Crime Scenes,” which opened in July, featured large scale photos by California’s Melanie Pullen.

Now a new Project Atrium exhibit is opening. While Pullen’s exhibit consisted of photos she had already shown elsewhere, Gustavo Godoy’s monumental sculpture, “Empty Altar, Empty Throne,” was created specifically for MOCA.

The sculpture, which is 26 feet high, 25 feet long and 20 feet wide, was built by Godoy in his studio in Los Angeles. He then disassembled it, shipped the parts across country and spent a week reassembling it inside MOCA.

Godoy said he had been talking with Polednik about doing something at the Monterey Museum of Art in California, where she was chief curator before she was hired here.

He said when she suggested doing the project in Jacksonville instead he was intrigued, especially after he saw MOCA’s Atrium. While he always thinks three dimensionally as he builds his sculpture, the fact that this one can be seen from multiple floors adds a different dynamic, he said.

“I still don’t know what it’s going to look like,” he said in an interview from Los Angeles while he was building the sculpture.

Godoy, whose father was an architect and urban planner, has been visiting construction sites since his childhood. He even studied architecture for a year in school. So he brings an architect’s sensibility to his work.

But the advantage he has in constructing his sculptures is that “I don’t have to deal with practical things like clients and regulations,” Godoy said.

Like many of his pieces, it has an interactive component. Museum visitors can physically climb up into the sculpture, which encourages “a childhood playful sense of wonder and discovery,” Polednik said. “It will be fun to walk around it, explore the piece itself and how the work changes the space of the Atrium.”

Museum officials have not yet decided what they’ll do with the sculpture after the exhibit ends March 11.